Google Ads for hotels: how to fill rooms in low season

Google Ads for hotels is most useful in the months when rooms don’t fill themselves, if you get three things right. Bid on searches from people who are already choosing where to stay. Send every click to a page built for one offer. Set the budget by the dates you still need to fill. Miss one of the three and you pay for clicks that never become bookings.

It’s November. You have twelve rooms and three bookings for the weekend. The mortgage and the receptionist’s salary cost the same as in July, and now you’re heating the building too. Guests still travel in these months; they just aren’t thinking about you. Google Ads reaches them at the moment they search. So don’t ask whether you can afford ads with so few bookings. Ask what each empty night costs you.

This guide covers Search campaigns for small hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi (farm stays), and vacation rentals in Italy. Google Hotel Ads, the price ads you see when you look up a hotel on Google, are a different product, and I explain the difference near the end.

Why Google Ads for hotels works in the quiet months

An ad on Instagram interrupts people who were looking at something else. A search ad answers someone who has just typed “agriturismo with heated pool November” or “romantic B&B Lucca weekend.” That person isn’t daydreaming about Italy. They’re deciding where to sleep.

Clicks are sold in an auction, so when fewer properties bid on the same searches, clicks tend to cost less. In the quiet months, that can work in your favor. There are fewer searches too, so every click has to count.

One honest warning: ads bring visitors, not bookings. If your website is slow, your photos are dark, or your price is out of line, you pay for clicks that leave. That’s why ads come last in my five steps for marketing a small hotel.

Who books in the quiet months, and where to reach them

Start from last year’s bookings: who stayed with you in the quiet months, where they came from, how far ahead they booked, and through which channel. For many properties in Tuscany, that shows two groups, and each needs its own campaign.

Guests from abroad in spring and fall

These guests often fly in from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, or the US, for the mild weather and the quieter towns. They usually book weeks or months ahead, so target the countries they live in, write the ads in their language, and start early. Only target a language if the page you send people to is written in it.

Italians on a weekend away

In winter, your best guests may be Italians who can drive to you for two nights: for a property in Tuscany, people from Florence, Bologna, Milan, or Rome. They often book close to the date, for a birthday, an anniversary, or a ponte (a long weekend around a public holiday such as November 1 or December 8). They search in Italian, for things like “weekend romantico in Toscana” (a romantic weekend in Tuscany), so this campaign needs Italian keywords, Italian ads, and an Italian page. Sell a weekend away, not a vacation.

Target those cities, or a radius around your property. By default, Google also shows your ads to people elsewhere who have shown interest in the places you choose. For a weekend offer, switch the campaign’s location option to “Presence,” which reaches only people who are in, or regularly in, those places.

Choosing keywords for hotel Google Ads

Generic searches such as “hotel Tuscany” tend to be crowded and expensive, and the people typing them are still far from a decision. Searches for a specific stay usually cost less and bring people who already want what you offer:

• “spa weekend Tuscany”
• “wine tasting weekend Chianti”
• “truffle hunting Tuscany November”
• “cooking holiday Tuscany”

So the offer comes first. A truffle dinner, a guided tasting, or the fireplace in the old barn gives the campaign something specific to say. If you’re not sure what to sell in the quiet months, I cover niche stays and the guests who search for them in how to increase hotel occupancy in low season.

Two settings protect a small budget:

• Phrase match and exact match keep your ads on searches close in meaning to your keywords. Broad match can also show them on searches that don’t contain your keyword’s direct meaning, which is harder to control on a small budget.
• Negative keywords block the searches you never want to pay for, such as “jobs” (people looking for hotel work) or “for sale” (people shopping for a villa).

Your own name

Search for your property’s name on your phone. If a booking site’s ad appears above your own website, some guests who were already looking for you may book through it, and you’ll pay commission on a guest you had already won. A small campaign on your own name can put your website back on top.

One ad, one page, one offer

Sending ads to your home page is the quickest way to waste the budget. Someone who clicks an ad for a spa weekend in November and lands on your home page has to go looking for the offer, and many give up. The rule is simple: one ad, one page, one offer. That page shows:

• photos of the experience itself: the spa, the tasting, dinner by the fire;
• the price of the package, what’s included, and the dates;
• one clear next step, such as “Book now” or “Ask on WhatsApp”;
• all of it in the language of the ad.

Without it, you pay Google to bring guests to a closed door. If your website can’t hold pages like this, or adding one takes weeks, fix that before you spend on ads. Here’s how much a hotel website costs in Italy, and what drives the price.

Every booking made on that page is also a direct booking, with no commission to pay. The other ways to win them are in my direct bookings guide.

Remarketing: remind the people who looked

In the quiet months, a visitor who doesn’t book on the first visit is worth a second try. They may be comparing places, checking their budget, or waiting to ask their partner. Remarketing shows your offer again to people who have already visited your website, for example with a reminder of when the offer ends.

It has two limits. In Europe, visitors must accept your cookie banner before they can be added to the list, as Google’s EU user consent policy requires. And Google only uses a list once it has enough recent visitors, which can take a while on a small property’s website. Treat remarketing as a second step, once your main campaign brings steady traffic.

How much to spend: set the budget by the calendar

There’s no right budget for hotels in general, only for the nights you need to fill, so work backwards. Say you want 10 more room-nights in November, and each one leaves you €80 once cleaning, breakfast, and laundry are paid. Those nights are worth €800 to you. If a campaign brings them for less than that, it pays.

Google Ads works with an average daily budget, and you can change it whenever you like. On a busy day a campaign may spend up to twice that amount, but over a month you won’t be charged more than 30.4 times it. At €10 a day, that’s at most €20 on one day and €304 in a month.

That flexibility is what makes ads useful in the quiet months: you pay to fill gaps in the calendar, not to advertise for its own sake.

• Raise the budget for dates that are still empty, such as a weekend three weeks away.
• Lower it, or pause the campaign, when the dates fill on their own.
• Name the dates in the ad and on the page (“Two rooms free, November 13–15”).
• Use the ad schedule to show ads only on the days and at the hours when inquiries come in, once your data shows a pattern.

How to tell if Google Ads for your hotel is working

Don’t judge a campaign by views or clicks. Judge it by two numbers:

• Cost per booking: what you spent on ads, divided by the bookings they brought.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): the value of those bookings, divided by what the ads cost. For example, €300 of ads that bring €1,500 of bookings is a ROAS of 5, or 500%.

To see either one, Google Ads has to know which clicks became bookings. Set up conversion tracking for completed bookings, inquiry forms, calls, and taps on your WhatsApp button. If guests book through a separate booking engine, ask its provider how it can report bookings to Google Ads.

Then compare. On the same stay, a booking site such as Booking.com, Airbnb, or Vrbo would keep a commission: in a European Commission study, most independent hotels reported rates between 10% and 20% of the booking. If your ads bring a booking for less than that, they’re doing better than the booking site would. And in the quiet months, the real alternative is often an empty room, which earns nothing.

Give a new campaign a few weeks before you judge it. Then open the search terms report to see which searches triggered your ads, cut the keywords that spend without bringing bookings or inquiries, and move the money to the ones that do.

Google Hotel Ads: not the same thing

“Google Ads for hotels” and “Google Hotel Ads” sound alike, but they’re different things.

When someone looks at a hotel on Google Search or Maps, Google shows a box with room prices and links to book, from booking sites and, if it’s connected, from the hotel itself. The box works like a price-comparison site, and Hotel Ads are the paid links in it. You buy them with a hotel campaign, or with Performance Max for travel goals, Google’s automated campaign type for hotels, which also runs your ads on Search, YouTube, Maps, and other Google channels.

Hotel Ads need a live feed of your prices and availability, sent through a Hotel Center account or, as Google recommends, through an integration partner: often the company behind your booking engine or channel manager, if it works with Google. The free booking links in the same box cost nothing per click and also need a partner to send your prices. Here is how free booking links work.

For a small property, the order is simple. First, ask your booking engine provider whether your free booking link is live. Then run a Search campaign you control. Look at Hotel Ads once your prices can reach Google and your conversion tracking works.

Google Ads for vacation rentals

If you rent out a villa or a vacation home (a holiday rental, as British owners say), a Search campaign works the same way, with three differences:

• You have one unit to sell. Pause the campaign the moment your dates are booked, or you’ll pay for clicks you can’t serve.
• Stays are longer. Guests look for a week, often for a group: “villa with pool Tuscany sleeps 8,” “farmhouse rental Tuscany October.” The page needs every room, where everyone sleeps, the full price for the week, and the calendar.
• Google’s rental results aren’t open to you directly. For its vacation rental results, Google doesn’t treat a home rented out by its owner as a business: only homes run by professional property managers get there, through booking sites or software connected to Google. So for a single villa, a Search campaign to your own website is the simplest way to advertise on Google.

Ads amplify what they find

You can pick the right searches and the right budget, but if the photos of your spa weekend are dark and blurry, people reach the page and don’t book. Ads amplify whatever they find, good photos and bad ones.

That’s why campaigns work best when the photos, the website, SEO, and the ads tell the same story. It’s how I work in my hotel marketing service: the campaign, the page it lands on, the photos, and the tracking, with one point of contact. The ad budget goes straight to Google, separate from my fee.

Filling the quiet months isn’t an advertising trick. It means turning what your property already has (the fireplace, the spa, the wine cellar) into reasons to come in January, and putting those reasons in front of people while they decide.